As we walked, the thought of my mother returned to me violently, rushing, barging about my head like a drunken woman. For a long time, I had not had such thoughts. When I spoke about it to Partenau, in the Crimea, I had stuck to the facts, the ones that counted least. Here it was another order of thoughts, bitter, full of hate, tinged with shame. When had that begun? When I was born? Was it possible that I had never forgiven her for the fact of my birth, that insanely arrogant right she had granted herself to bring me into the world? One strange fact: I had turned out to be acutely allergic to her breast milk; as she herself had told me much later on, offhandedly, I was allowed only baby bottles, and I watched my twin sister breastfeed with a look full of bitterness. But in my early childhood I must have loved her, as all children love their mothers. I still remember the tender, female odor of her bathroom, which plunged me into numb delight, like a return to the lost womb: it must have been, if I thought about it, a mixture of the humid vapor of the bath, of perfumes, soaps, maybe too the smell of her sex and maybe too that of her shit; even when she didn’t let me get into the bath with her, I never got enough of sitting on the edge of the tub, near her, blissfully. Then everything had changed. But when, exactly, and why? I hadn’t blamed it right away on the disappearance of my father: that idea didn’t come till later on, when she prostituted herself to that Moreau. But even before meeting him, she had begun to behave in ways that sent me into a wild rage. Was it my father’s departure? It’s hard to say, but the pain seemed sometimes to drive her mad. One night, in Kiel, she had gone all alone into a worker’s café, near the docks, and had gotten drunk, surrounded by foreigners, dock workers, sailors. It’s even possible that she sat down on a table and lifted her skirt, exposing her sex. Whatever the case, things got scandalously out of hand, till the lady got thrown out into the street, where she fell into a puddle. A policeman brought her home, soaking, disheveled, her dress filthy; I thought I would die of shame. Little as I was—I must have been about ten—I wanted to beat her, and she wouldn’t even have been able to defend herself, but my sister intervened: “Have pity on her. She’s sad. She doesn’t deserve your anger.” I took a long time to calm down. But even then I must not have hated her, not yet; I was just humiliated. The hatred must have come later, when she forgot her husband and sacrificed her children to give herself to a stranger. Of course that didn’t happen in one day, there were several stages on the way. Moreau, as I’ve said, was not a bad man, and in the beginning he made great efforts to be accepted by us; but he was a narrow-minded fellow, a prisoner of his coarse bourgeois, capitalist concepts, slave to his desire for my mother, who soon turned out to be more masculine than he; thus, he willingly became an accomplice to her erring ways. Then there was that great catastrophe, after which I was sent away to boarding school; there were also more traditional conflicts, like the one that broke out when I was finishing high school. I was about to pass my baccalauréat, I had to make a decision about what to do afterward; I wanted to study philosophy and literature, but my mother firmly refused: “You have to have a profession. Do you think we’ll always live on the kindness of others? Afterward, you can do what you like.” And Moreau said mockingly: “What? Teacher in some godforsaken village for ten years? A two-cent, half-starved hack? You’re no Rousseau, my boy, come back to earth.” God how I hated them. “You have to have a career,” Moreau said. “Afterward, if you want to write poems in your spare time, that’s your business. But at least you’ll earn enough to feed your family.” That lasted for more than a week; running away wouldn’t have done any good, I would have been caught, as when I had tried to run away before. I had to give in. Both of them decided on enrolling me in the École libre des sciences politiques, from which I could have entered one of the major government branches: Conseil d’État, the accounts court, the Inspection générale des finances. I would be a civil servant, a mandarin: a member, they hoped, of the elite. “It will not be easy,” Moreau explained to me, “you’ll have to work hard”; but he had connections in Paris, he would help me. Ah, things didn’t happen as they wished and hoped: the mandarins of France now were serving my country; and I had ended up here, in the frozen ruins of Stalingrad, and probably for good. My sister had more luck: she was a girl, and what she wished didn’t count as much; just finishing touches, to appeal to her future husband. They allowed her to go freely to Zurich to study psychology with a certain Dr. Carl Jung, who has become quite well-known since then.

The worst had already happened. Around the spring of 1929, I was still in boarding school when I received a letter from my mother. She announced that since there had never been any news from him, and since her repeated inquiries at various German consulates had yielded nothing, she had filed a request for my father to be declared legally dead. Seven years had gone by since his disappearance, and the court had issued the decision she had hoped for; now she was going to marry Moreau, a good, generous man who was like a father to us. This odious letter threw me into a paroxysm of rage. I sent her a letter full of violent insults: My father, I wrote, was not dead, and the profound desire they both had of it would not be enough to kill him. If she wanted to sell herself to a despicable little French shopkeeper, that was entirely up to her; as for me, I would regard their marriage as illegitimate and bigamous. I hoped at least that they wouldn’t try to inflict on me a bastard whom I could only detest. My mother, wisely, did not answer this philippic. That summer, I arranged to have myself invited by the parents of a rich friend, and so didn’t set foot in Antibes. They got married in August; I tore up the invitation and flushed it down the toilet; the following school vacation, I still persisted in not going back; finally they managed to get me to return, but that’s another story. In the meantime, my hatred was there, intact, full-fledged, something whole and almost succulent inside me, a pyre waiting for a match. But to avenge myself I only knew low, shameful means: I had kept a photo of my mother; I jacked off or sucked my lovers in front of it and made them ejaculate onto it. I did worse than that. In Moreau’s large house, I gave myself over to baroque, fantastically elaborate erotic games. Inspired by the Martian novels of E. R. Burroughs (the author of the Tarzan of my childhood), which I devoured with the same passion as the Greek classics, I locked myself up in the large upstairs bathroom, running the water so as not to attract attention, and created extravagant scenes from my imaginary world. Captured by an army of four-armed green men from Barsoom, I was stripped naked, bound, and led before a superb copper-skinned Martian princess, haughty and impassive on her throne. There, using a belt for the leather bonds and with a broom or a bottle stuck in my anus, I writhed on the cold tiles while half a dozen of her massive, mute bodyguards took turns raping me in front of her. But brooms or bottles could hurt: I looked for something more suitable. Moreau loved thick German sausages; at night, I took one from the fridge, rolled it between my hands to warm it up, lubricated it with olive oil; afterward, I washed it carefully, dried it, and put it back where I had found it. The next day I watched Moreau and my mother slicing it up and eating it with great pleasure, and I refused my portion with a smile, offering a lack of appetite as my excuse, delighted at going hungry so I could watch them eat. It’s true that this happened before their wedding, when I still regularly visited their house. So it wasn’t their marriage in itself that bothered me. But these were just the miserable, pitiful acts of revenge of a powerless child. Later on, after I came of age, I turned away from them, left for Germany, and stopped answering my mother’s letters. But the story went on, secretly, and it just needed a trifle, the cries of a dying man, for everything to come back all at once, since it had always existed, it came from elsewhere, from a world that was not the world of men and of everyday work, a world that was usually sealed but whose doors the war could suddenly throw open, freeing in a hoarse, inarticulate, brutal shout its gaping darkness, a pestilential swamp, overturning the established order of things, customs and laws, forcing men to kill each other, putting them back under the yoke from which they had with so much difficulty liberated themselves, the weight of all that came before. We were once again following the tracks along the abandoned train cars: lost in my thoughts, I had scarcely noticed the long walk around the kurgan. The hard snow, which crackled beneath my boots, was taking on bluish tints beneath the pallid moon that lit up our path. Another fifteen minutes and we were back at the Univermag; I felt quite fresh, reinvigorated by the walk. Ivan saluted me casually and left to join his compatriots, taking my submachine gun with him. In the large operations room, beneath the enormous chandelier salvaged from a theater, the officers of the Stadtkommandantur were drinking and singing in chorus “O Du fröhliche” and “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.” One of them handed me a glass of red wine; I drained it in one swallow, even though it was good French wine. In the hallway, I passed Möritz, who looked at me, stunned: “You went out?”—“Yes, Herr Kommissar. I went to reconnoiter some of our positions, to get an idea of the city.” His face darkened: “Don’t go risking yourself uselessly. I had a hard job getting you; if you get yourself killed right away, I’ll never be able to replace you.”—“Zu Befehl, Herr Kommissar.” I saluted him and went to change. A little later, Möritz offered his officers a drink, from two bottles of Cognac carefully held in reserve; he introduced me to my new colleagues, Leibbrandt, Dreyer, Vopel, the intelligence officer, Hauptsturmführer von Ahlfen, Herzog, Zumpe. Zumpe and Vopel, the Untersturmführer I had met the day before, worked with Thomas. There was also Weidner, the Gestapoleiter for the city (Thomas was Leiter IV for the whole Kessel, and thus Weidner’s superior). We drank to the Führer and to the Endsieg and wished each other a merry Christmas; it all remained sober and cordial—I vastly preferred it to the sentimental or religious effusions of the soldiers. Thomas and I, out of curiosity, went to the midnight Mass that was celebrated in the main hall. The Catholic priest and Lutheran pastor of one of the divisions took turns officiating, in a perfect ecumenical spirit, and the faithful of both confessions prayed together. General von Seydlitz-Kurbach, who commanded the LIST Corps, was there with several division commanders and their chiefs of staff; Thomas pointed out Sanne, who commanded the One Hundredth Jägerdivision, Korfes, von Hartmann. Some of our Ukrainians were also praying: they were, Thomas explained, Uniates from Galicia, who celebrate Christmas at the same time as we do, unlike their Orthodox cousins. I examined them, but didn’t see Ivan among them. After the Mass, we went back to drink Cognac; then, suddenly exhausted, I went to bed. I dreamed of metros again: this time, two parallel tracks ran side by side between brilliantly lit platforms, then joined each other farther on down the tunnel, after a separation marked by large round cement pylons; but this switch didn’t work and a team of women in orange uniforms, including a black woman, were working feverishly to repair it while the train, crowded with passengers, was already leaving the station.